Category Archives: Documentary

New to VOD this week:
BOBBI JENE

Director:
Elvira Lind

Premiere:
Tribeca 2017

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, Camden, Docaviv, Docs Against Gravity, Biografilm, Melbourne, Helsinki

About:
An American dancer leaves a position with Israel’s premier dance company to return to the US to begin a solo career.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, January 5:
IN THE LAND OF POMEGRANATES

Director:
Hava Kohav Beller

Premiere:
January 2018 (theatrical)

About:
An exploration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Beller attempts to tackle the massive, and seemingly perpetual, issue of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians in this thoughtful but flawed project. While ostensibly about Vacation From War, an effort to bring together the younger generation of both sides in dialogue with a hope toward perhaps reaching some kind of mutual understanding, Beller makes the strange choice to bypass the potential stories these participants might have been able to share and instead profiles several unconnected individuals, from a traumatized Israeli survivor of a suicide bombing to a young Palestinian boy who receives life-saving heart surgery from an Israeli doctor. This broadening results in the project becoming a loose survey, taking on far too much and greatly lessening whatever potential transformative impact might have come from the Vacation From War discussions.